These skulls are part of the Choeung Ek Memorial Stupa where the remains of the Choeung Ek killing field victims are reverently preserved. Sadly this site was one of more than 300 mass graves found throughout Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge period.
During the reign of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, nearly 2 million people or a quarter of the country's population were systematically executed. The Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, on a quest to create a self-sufficient agrarian socialist utopia, pushed to purge anyone with an education from the new society. People were removed from the cities and forced to work in the countryside of the newly formed Democratic Kampuchea.
The Cambodian genocide ended when the Vietnamese army invaded in 1978 and successfully removed the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979.
This is the entrance to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Phen, also known S-21(Security Prison 21). This building, once a secondary school, became a detention center where prisoners charged with crimes against the revolution were interrogated. The majority of the 20,000 people imprisoned here, were eventually taken to the Choeung Ek killing fields to be executed. This museum is both a memorial and educational site dedicated to bearing witness to the Cambodian genocide in the hope that such atrocities will not be repeated.
One of the interrogation rooms
The Cells
Several stone markers listing the names of the inmates are placed around the large monument which reads: Never will we forget the crimes committed during the Democratic Kampuchea regime.
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